


A Familiar Face

by Mithen



Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Facial Shaving, Friendship/Love, Gen, Kayfabe Compliant, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Shaving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-26
Updated: 2017-04-26
Packaged: 2018-10-24 06:17:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10735866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithen/pseuds/Mithen
Summary: Sami's still not sure whether he's going to Smackdown or staying on Raw, but he knows Kevin's probably miserable at being "exiled" and he suspects Kev might need someone to take care of him.  He shouldn't bother.  He should know better.He's currently breaking into Kevin's hotel room.





	A Familiar Face

**Author's Note:**

> I've given Kevin a cleaner shave than he got in canon, but I was _literally_ 3000 words into this story when he showed up on Smackdown, so I'm just running with it.

It was altogether possible, Sami Zayn thought, that breaking into Kevin Owens’s hotel room armed with a straight razor was not the smartest thing he had ever done in a career full of not-very-smart things. But here he was. He wasn’t even sure why, though he supposed it could be connected to the conversation he’d overheard just after the show ended, just after Kevin had lost to Dean Ambrose in his last match on the Raw roster.

Angle still hadn’t been able to tell him if he was being sent to Smackdown or not, and after asking five times Sami was beginning to worry that he might be annoying the GM a little bit. So he’d decided to go straight to the top for answers and had headed to Hunter’s office. 

He had stopped in surprise when he heard Kevin’s voice from within--not full of bluster, but lost, forlorn: “It was Chris. It was Chris’s fault both times.” A pause, then a horrifyingly meek, “Sir.”

“I gave you opportunities, Owens.” Hunter’s voice sent a chill down Sami’s spine.

“Yes, sir,” said Kevin.

“I chose you over Rollins.”

“You did, sir.”

“And should my chosen champion be so easily distracted?”

A silence, then a new voice: Samoa Joe’s silken menace. “Speak up, Kev.”

“I suppose not, sir.” There was defeat in Kevin’s voice, and resignation, and a terrible baffled grief.

Hunter said other things, about how his chosen champion should _act,_ and how he should _look,_ and by the time Sami slipped away with his fists clenched, he knew that Kevin was going to be sent to Smackdown. Sami wouldn’t have considered that a punishment himself, but he knew Kevin would. 

He knew he shouldn’t be surprised about this. Joe and Hunter were merciless, remorseless, and emotionless. And Kevin was--

Well. Sami had seen Kevin’s face when Jericho’s music hit. Kevin might be merciless and remorseless, but he had always really sucked at the “emotionless” part.

Sami was slightly alarmed at how easy it had been to convince the nice woman at the front desk to give him a key to Kevin’s room. Did he really look _that_ trustworthy? He didn’t feel it.

He wasn’t sure what he felt right now.

“Kev?” he whispered, stepping into the room. The lights were out but the curtains were open, and the city lights cast enough illumination that Sami could look around. The bed was unslept in. “Kev?” he said again, warily, half-expecting to get jumped, as if Kevin would have been waiting behind the door on the off-chance Sami took it into his head to break into his room.

There was a small sound from the bathroom.

Sami felt his shoulders slump and suddenly he wasn’t at all uneasy anymore, he was just worried and sad. He went to the bathroom and knocked lightly on the jamb. The door was open and Sami knew what he was going to see before he looked around the corner.

Kevin was curled up, fully clothed, in the bathtub, with his arms over his head. Sami didn’t know why Kevin ended up in the bathtub after a major setback, but he always did. It was something about feeling safe and enclosed, maybe. Sami had found him there after they’d lost the Ring of Honor tag titles, withdrawn into silence. Since he’d come to the WWE, Kevin had lost the NXT title, the Intercontinental title twice, and the Universal title. How many nights had he spent huddled in a bathtub weeping with fury and humiliation, with no one to check on him?

“Go away,” Kevin said without looking at him, his voice hollow. 

“Yeah, right,” said Sami. He sat down on the side of the bathtub, looking down at Kevin. 

“What are you doing here.” It was too flat to be a question.

Sami didn’t want to explain what he’d overheard at the arena earlier. “Just thought you’d need some help getting yourself together. You gotta get out of there, buddy, you’ve got Smackdown to get ready for tomorrow.”

Kevin’s laugh was bitter as battery fluid. “Why?”

“Well, for fuck’s sake, you want to keep your job, and without Hunter to protect you now it’s--”

“No. Why are _you_ here,” Kevin said.

“Oh, come on,” Sami said. He actually didn’t exactly know the answer to that very good question, but there was no way he was going to admit it to Kevin. Instead, he reached down and grabbed Kevin’s shoulder. “You need to--”

Kevin rolled over and looked at him, and Sami barely managed to keep from recoiling. Kevin’s eyes were bloodshot with weeping, hair and beard still matted with sweat from his match. “You look like hell,” Sami said, “and you don’t smell much better, buddy.”

“Stop calling me that,” Kevin said, and put his forearm over his eyes again. 

“Look, get up and take a fucking shower or I’m going to _make_ you take one,” Sami snapped.

Kevin yanked his arm down to glare. “You wouldn’t _dare_ ,” he said, and Sami was so relieved to get a glint of anger from him that he almost smiled for a second.

Instead, he reached over and turned on the shower.

Cold water pelted down on Kevin, who yelped and flailed around, gurgling obscenities through the deluge. He grabbed Sami’s wrist and yanked him forward into the spray so they were both soaked--at least the water had become hot by then, Sami reflected as he sputtered and wrestled with Kevin, both of them unable to get a good purchase on the slippery porcelain. Kevin was lying down on his back and Sami had the high ground, though, so the advantage was his. 

“Damn it, get your stupid clothes off,” Sami said, tugging at his t-shirt. “I will wash you in them if I have to.” He finally wrenched the shirt off and hurled it across the room where it hit the wall with a messy _splat._ Grabbing a bottle, he liberally doused Kevin in shampoo; Kevin cursed him steadily in a sodden voice as Sami turned their struggle into a sort of rough scrubbing, sending suds flying everywhere. The air was heavy with steam and the smell of soap and the sound of Kevin’s swearing.

“Take your…argh... socks off,” Sami snarled, peeling them off Kevin’s wet feet and tossing them across the room too. 

He lathered Kevin’s feet, and Kevin made a startled squeaking noise, flailing wildly at him. “No no no,” Kevin said as Sami tried to pull his shorts and underwear off, but Sami was inexorable and managed to use Kevin’s own struggles to finally wrench them off. As he did Kevin’s knee collided with his jaw and Sami went down on the floor, seeing stars.

There was a long silence while Sami looked thoughtfully at the sparks chasing each other on the ceiling tiles, broken only by the sound of the shower running and a steady, wretched snuffling from Kevin.

Eventually Kevin’s voice echoed off the tiles, oddly small: “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“I know,” said Sami. He got up on his knees, gripping the edge of the tub so he wouldn’t slip on the wet floor. Kevin had rolled over onto his stomach, letting the shower splash around him unheeded. Sami grabbed the shampoo bottle and got some on his hands, then lathered Kevin’s hair thoroughly. All the fight seemed to have gone out of Kevin at last; he just lay there and let the water and Sami’s hands touch him as if he’d lost all will to struggle.

Sami knew he should feel relieved by this, but he wasn’t sure he did.

He soaped Kevin’s hair steadily, scrubbing at his scalp, and felt Kevin sigh. Standing up, he grabbed the shower head to rinse off the soap. “Sit up,” he said softly, and after a hesitation, Kevin did, keeping his eyes closed as if somehow he could pretend Sami didn’t even exist, as if he weren’t right in front of him, dripping wet and annoyed.

Sami got his hands soaped up again and dug them into the scraggly mess of Kevin’s beard. He could feel Kevin’s jaw working, and his lower lip was trembling, just a little. Sami could see a few gray hairs here and there, and felt his heart turn over oddly with unwanted emotion. He turned on the water in the bathtub and cupped a handful to rinse the soap out of Kevin’s beard, trying to get all the suds out of it.

“What happened to your eye?”

Sami’s gaze flicked up in surprise to find Kevin’s eyes open and looking at him. “Oh,” he said, feeling heat crawl up the back of his neck. “Just work stuff.” And then, because he knew eventually Kevin would find out anyway: “Samoa Joe might have punched me in the eye. Because I punched him in the nose in the locker room after the show.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a big bully,” Sami said. “And I was tired of him running off his mouth.” There were bubbles on Kevin’s bare chest and there was a lot of bare Kevin everywhere. Sami supposed he had no one to blame but himself for that, and tried to stay focused on getting the soap out of Kevin’s beard.

“I bet he was calling me a fat loser,” Kevin said, his voice flat.

“That’s not why I did it,” Sami said.

“So he was,” said Kevin.

Sami splashed water on Kevin’s face and didn’t answer.

Kevin sighed and closed his eyes. “I thought we were well,” he said. 

“I guess you weren’t.”

“I guess.”

Sami stood up in the heavy silence and grabbed the least-drenched towel from the rack. He started scrubbing Kevin’s hair so vigorously it must have hurt, but Kevin just sort of swayed under his hands. He moved on to Kevin’s shoulders, and Kevin’s face emerged from beneath the towel, rosy and scowling. He pushed Sami away, not roughly but firmly. “I can dress myself,” he said. The words were irritable, but his voice was shaking slightly. 

Sami grabbed the hotel robe from the hook on the door and tossed it at him. “We’re not done yet,” he said, pointing at him before leaving the bathroom to lean on the door frame, waiting.

“No such luck, I guess,” Kevin sighed from behind him. Sami listened to him move around, listened to the sink running. On the plus side, staying on Raw meant that he’d probably get another chance to punch Joe in the nose again. He’d looked so surprised. The black eye was totally worth it. When Kevin emerged from the bathroom, still damp with steam and smelling of soap, wrapped up in the bathrobe, he blinked at Sami and Sami realized he was still smiling at the memory of Joe’s shocked face. He wiped the smile away hastily.

“Get on the bed,” Sami said. Something wary flickered behind Kevin’s eyes. “Oh for God’s sake, I’m not going to kiss you or anything terrifying. Just get on the damn bed.”

Kevin sat down on the edge of the bed with a sigh, then lay down and stared at the ceiling. “What now?”

Sami started filling the electric kettle. “I’m going to give you a shave.”

Kevin looked even more alarmed than he had at Sami ordering him onto the bed. “What?”

“You heard me.” 

“Sami, you know I just look like a giant baby without a beard.”

“Well, you sound like a giant baby right now,” Sami said briskly. “This is a new Kevin Owens Era on Smackdown. You’re going to go in there and make it… make it KO Country.”

“That sounds dumb.”

“No it doesn’t,” said Sami. “This is a new beginning for you, and you’re going to mark it by going beardless.”

“I don’t like it,” said Kevin, but he didn’t move from the bed.

Sami pulled the little kit out of his bag and unzipped it, setting the brush, soap, and expensive bone-handled straight razor on the nightstand. 

“These aren’t yours,” Kevin said, eyeing the razor.

“I asked Graves for advice and he loaned me his dap kit.”

“Dopp kit.”

“What?”

“He calls it a dopp kit. Chris did too.” Kevin blinked at the ceiling. “Did Graves laugh at you when you didn’t know what it was?”

“No.”

Kevin closed his eyes. “Oh.”

The kettle beeped and Sami grabbed a towel and poured hot water on it. “Mmmph,” Kevin said as Sami wrapped his face in it. “Fucking hot.”

“It’s supposed to be.”

There was a moment of silence in which Sami looked down at Kevin, his face obscured by towel.

“After Montreal,” Kevin said, then stopped. He cleared his throat. “I asked Joe how he dealt with having an enemy that respected him.” His voice was muffled by the towel. “How that made him feel. If it made him feel good or bad or… like he wanted to cry or anything.”

“And?” Sami said after a moment.

“He said he didn’t have enemies, only opponents. And he said he didn’t feel anything about them,” Kevin said. His voice was full of wonder. “He said he didn’t feel anything at all.” A pause. “I envied him _so much._ ”

Sami didn’t trust his own voice, so he just peeled the towel off Kevin’s face. “Sit up a little,” he said, sticking some pillows under Kevin’s shoulders. Corey’s shaving soap came in a fancy little tin, because of course it did. Sami squinted at the label to avoid Kevin’s gaze, reading the ingredients as if they were very important. “Cedarwood and clary sage,” he said. “Sounds fancy.” He whisked the brush into the soap, feeling a bit foolish. Bending over Kevin, he started to rub the soap into his beard in little circles, feeling it coarse and tangled under his fingers as he moved Kevin’s head back and forth to get the right angle.

“Hunter--” Kevin stopped. “Hunter said I didn’t dress well enough.”

That wasn’t exactly what Hunter had said, but correcting Kevin would reveal that Sami had been outside the door listening. “Screw him if your suit wasn’t good enough,” Sami said mildly. “Go out and buy a new one tomorrow before Smackdown. New shoes, too. Show him how sharp a dresser you can be. You can be the kind of man who shaves with fancy shaving soap now. You’re rich. You’re a champion. You’re one of the best in the world.”

“I am,” said Kevin. It should have sounded like a brag, but his voice tilted abruptly on the last word and it wavered into something close to a question.

“Damn right,” Sami agreed with him as if it had been a simple statement of fact, continuing to rub soap into Kevin’s beard, and Kevin sighed beneath his hands and was quiet for a moment. 

“Do you know how to use one of those?” Kevin said dubiously as Sami finished and picked up the razor. “I’ve only ever seen you use a trimmer.”

“Sure,” said Sami with more confidence than he felt. “My father taught me how.” It had been a while, but…

Swallowing hard, he put the blade to Kevin’s cheek, just above the beard. Kevin was looking at him, his gaze clear and more steady than Sami felt his hands were. He seemed utterly unworried, resigned to whatever was going to happen.

Sami drew the blade down and Kevin’s beard gave way before it as he cautiously cleared a swath of cheek free of hair. The room was quiet except for the soft scrape of the razor and the sound of Kevin’s breathing; Sami could feel his heartbeat under his fingers at the throat. He tilted Kevin’s head back and forth, tugging at the skin to get it tight enough to shave easily, losing himself in the simple, meticulous motions, the rhythm of it. 

“You were so proud when your beard started coming in,” Sami heard himself say into the stillness. “I remember catching you standing in front of the mirror admiring it.” The corner of Kevin’s mouth twitched in something close to a smile. How long had it been since he’d seen Kevin’s face unobscured? Sami wondered. More than a decade. He drew the blade across Kevin’s jawline, unseen for years, since they were just teens together. A face Sami could barely remember now. He wondered if even Kevin could remember it.

He cleaned the blade and switched to the other side, slowly clearing the tangled hair away to reveal ruddy skin. Angles and planes coming clear once more. “You know what?” Sami said. “I’ve missed your face.” Kevin started to open his mouth, then closed it again when Sami frowned at him. “You always seemed to think a beard could help you hide what you were feeling,” Sami said.

Both sides of Kevin’s face were clear now; only his upper lip, chin, and Adam’s apple were still soaped. Sami stopped to clean the blade again and heard Kevin say, almost too low to be heard, “I’ve missed your face too.”

Sami chuckled. “Well, I’m not going to shave--”

“--that’s not what I meant,” Kevin said, his voice level.

Sami looked down at the razor in his hand, waiting until the blade was steady once more. “Well, you’ll only have to see it on screens from now,” he said.

“You’re not going to Smackdown?” Kevin’s voice was utterly neutral.

“It doesn’t look it,” said Sami. “At least, I haven’t heard anything. So it looks like you’ll be free of me.”

“Well, thank God,” Kevin said. He closed his eyes. “That’s great.” Another pause. “I won’t miss you at all.”

Sami set the razor to Kevin’s upper lip. “Shh,” he said. Then he started to make the tiny, economical movements to bare Kevin’s upper lip. 

Kevin seemed to be holding his breath as the sharp metal touched him again and again, deft and cautious. Sami traced his upper lip with steel, feeling fresh skin soft beneath his fingers. He waited until he was nearly done to say, almost under his breath, “I’ll miss you exactly as much as you’ll miss me.”

Kevin’s lips suddenly trembled beneath his fingers. The blade slipped, and one small bright bead of blood welled up at the corner of Kevin’s mouth.

Without thinking, Sami put his own mouth to it.

He tasted blood and soap and went very still, seeing Kevin’s startled eyes looking at him from far too close. Neither of them moved.

“You said you weren’t going to kiss me,” Kevin said after a moment, sounding infinitely surprised. The words shifted his mouth against Sami’s, the smoothness of his hairless upper lip contrasting in interesting ways with the smoothness of his mouth. 

“This isn’t a kiss,” Sami said against his skin, letting his mouth trail slightly further toward the corner of Kevin’s, but not moving away.

“I’m pretty sure this is a kiss,” Kevin said. “Mouths touching each other, that’s what a kiss _is,_ you dope.” His exasperated breath brushed Sami’s cheek, smelling of toothpaste. His skin smelled like cedarwood and whatever clary sage was. 

“CPR isn’t a kiss,” Sami pointed out with a very slight annoyed nuzzle.

“It’s called the ‘kiss of life,’ isn’t it? So it kind of still is. And in case you haven’t noticed, this definitely isn’t CPR, because you’re not--” Kevin’s voice wavered suddenly, “--you’re not saving my life or anything.”

They glared at each other from inches away, neither of them moving. Sami’s lips were still against the corner of Kevin’s mouth, still tasting just a hint of blood. Without even meaning to, his touched Kevin’s lip with his tongue, just a quick darting glance, and at that touch Kevin burst out into what would be nervous giggles if they weren’t coming from a 260-pound prizefighter, his whole body shaking. At the sound--so strangely young, just like this fresh new face nearly revealed--Sami started to laugh too; he put his head on Kevin’s shoulder and they just laughed together for no reason at all, just because life was strange and nothing had worked out how they planned, but here they were. 

“Be still,” Sami finally managed to say firmly, blinking away tears of laughter, and Kevin swallowed a last giggle with an effort. There were tears at the corners of his eyes as well.

“Okay,” he whispered.

Sami carefully cleared his chin of hair, taking it in his hand to turn Kevin’s head this way and that against the light. Then he moved the razor to Kevin’s throat.

He heard Kevin make a small noise as the metal touched his Adam’s apple. Sami’s hand went still. “I can stop,” he said. “You can do this yourself.”

Kevin was looking at him, his lips parted slightly, his eyes oddly bright. “No,” said Kevin. “You can do it.”

Sami took a breath. “You’re going to be great on Smackdown,” he said, drawing the blade gently along Kevin’s exposed throat, leaving bare clean skin in its wake. “You’ll show everyone in the world that you’re the best,” he said with another long, cautious stroke. “Nothing will stand in your way.” The last sweep, the last hairs gone. “You’ll have a fresh start.”

“Are you sure you won’t be there?” Kevin said softly.

Sami pulled back and looked at Kevin, feeling a strange shock of recognition at the face before him. It was a face from long ago, young and bright and talented, full of dreams and hope. He looked hopeful now, he was looking at Sami as if he wanted the answer to be _I'll be there and we’ll be together forever._

Sami took that face in his hands. “I really don’t know,” he said, and Kevin’s face fell. “But I kind of hope I am,” he added, and after a moment’s hesitation Kevin smiled, very slightly: an oddly shy smile.

Then he chuckled and was his familiar sardonic self once more, and Sami’s heart managed to pull out of free fall. “You know I will be _so pissed off_ if you show up and interrupt me,” he said.

“Oh,” said Sami, smiling back, “I would love to see your face.”


End file.
